


the city sunset over me (this mess we’re in)

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Angst, Asperger Syndrome, Drugs, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:57:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He wants to tell her that London is a map, that it’s engraved on his bones, but he doesn’t. He’s not sure she’d understand.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the city sunset over me (this mess we’re in)

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thank you to both [](http://nightdog-barks.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**nightdog_barks**](http://nightdog-barks.dreamwidth.org/) and [](http://daasgrrl.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://daasgrrl.livejournal.com/)**daasgrrl** for wonderful, exacting beta services. Rated Mature for drug use and angst.

The first thing Sherlock Holmes does when he gets to New York (apart from the _essentials_ like planning stash spots he’ll never use and purchasing television screens and extension cords at Best Buy) is buy a Metrocard.

Somewhere among his books there is a broken-backed copy of the London _A - Z_ , a dog-eared sheaf of tickets stuffed into it when he emptied a desk in Bromley or Ealing or Marylebone. Train journeys and ferry tickets and cinema stubs, the text half-obliterated by time.

There is the evidence, too: purloined from crime scenes or evidence lockers, carefully placed inside plastic folders for a future essay on ephemera as evidence. A Virgin Trains ticket from London to Coventry, a dark comma on the reverse (never used, they found the man that bought it lying face down behind an Asda, head framed by a halo of his own blood). A London Buses Adult Single ticket, crumpled into a pocket and forgotten until it became an alibi.

This is how you come to know a city. By breathing stale rubbery subway air and stumbling down oily alleyways and falling to your knees on hot pavement. Knowing the right corner to dart across traffic, knowing where the taxis prowl. Discovering by accident that a gap like a missing tooth between two houses will provide access to a leafy back lane, quiet and cool and private.

It is about feeling, too, the way people hurry through certain streets, their shoulders creeping high. The places people glare unrestrained at the men sitting against the concourse wall, the park where the homeless youth stand, laughing and wheeling and dealing in the sun.

He hated London sometimes. The great teeming animal _noise_ of her, the endless rattle of the tube and the way it seemed to physically _press_ against his ears, until he wanted to scream. But he loved her, too, because she raised him.

Holmes’ life has been defined by arcane interests and dangerous preoccupations. A memory: eight years old, reeling off a detailed description of the Tyburn Tree (which wasn't a tree but a gallows) to a boy in the same maths set as he at school, the words going dry in his throat when he realises that the boy isn't at all interested, is slightly repelled. Wear patterns on shoes, the Langstroth hive, blood splatters and bruises. Patterns in violence. The link between an armed robbery in Camden and an overdose in Glasgow.

The knowledge pleases him even if the crime doesn’t, and he remembers how _alive_ it made him feel, making connections nobody else could, drawing new maps in his head. Nothing was more delicious than that blood-soaring, endless ten seconds when he skated so close to an overdose he could feel it pulling at his eyelids, feel it _grabbing_ at him. But solving a new puzzle was close.

"The London Underground map was revolutionary," he says to Joan as they rattle along somewhere between 59th and Grand Central. He can't tell if she's really interested or just humouring him. Or maybe listening because she wants to ferret out some fucking detail about his career as a junkie.

He can see the Tube map in his head, the ninety-degree angles, the broad canary-yellow sweep of the Circle line. Take the Kensington branch to your father's London house, cigar smoke and whiskey and vague disappointment. Take the Northern Line to the time you said you'd _never, ever shoot up_ (that’s for junkies and you’re not a junkie, you’re really _not_ ) -- and the time (times) you ate your words. Change to the East London line for a 48 hour hold. Please mind the gap.

...

He tells Watson that he misses being able to listen to the shipping forecast when his insomnia is bad, when there are too many words and images bouncing around the smoothness of his skull to even _think_ about sleep.

_Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor._

He tells her about the reading room at the British Museum. About park benches in Russell Square and late-night noodles in Camberwell.

She asks him what went on in London, right before he left, and he wants to tell her about the woman he loved and the man he let get away, how he loved them both and hated them both. About crime and love. About how he’s always been a junkie, how once things started falling apart it seemed that every day of his life had been spent hurtling toward finding a body in an alleyway and knowing it was _his_ work and knowing that he, _the great Sherlock Holmes_ (that’s what Jim called him, in the taunting letters he sent) could have prevented it. He knows every brick of Jim Moriarty’s London. But he doesn’t tell her any of that. What difference would it make?

He wants to tell her that London is a map, that it’s engraved on his bones, but he doesn’t. He’s not sure she’d understand.

...

_I’ve always been an addict_ , people say in rehab.

He’s sampling daddy’s single malts at half-term. He’s standing shivering by a phone box in Brixton. He’s waking up with the flu in his first flat in Camberwell, the sheets curling back from the mattress like the pages of a warped book, spots of blood on the mattress. Except it isn’t the flu. And it’s not his flat, really.

He’s a liar, a thief, wastrel, and in the middle of all this he finds some time to be a detective. He can feel the city watching him.

...

The high, sweet rosin-dust smell of the music shop where he bought his first serious violin. He carried it home from Greenwich on the tube, his hands sweaty, the case bumping against his leg, too mindful of the fact that he had a £3,000 instrument in his hands.

It was the only thing he cared for, that violin. He carried it all around London, to Dartmoor and back. He’d wake up in the morning with the puzzle pieces of a case still rattling around in his head and see the gleaming wood on his table and know that he had the answer in his hands, all he had to do was _let the pieces fall into place_ , which for him was the same as thinking but not-thinking, which for him was the same as playing music.

He doesn’t know why he brought it to New York, really. His fingers know how to play but his mind won’t let him. There’s too much distance, too much time.

When Joan brings it to him the smell hits him like a fist, dust and rosin, right in the centre of his chest.

...

He’s been awake for 31 hours and he’s not sure what annoys him more: the fact that Joan is well-rested (and therefore chirpy), or the fact that she’s Concerned About Him, that well-worn sober companion phrase.

“Come on,” he says, trying to pretend that the light doesn’t hurt his eyes. “We’re going downtown.”

“You’ve just spent the entire night combing through the _New York Times_ archive,” Joan says. “Can’t it wait?”

“Obviously not,” Holmes says. But he’s never been good at waiting.

He feels frayed around the edges, a little dizzy.

The whole goddam city’s so _bright_ today — a generic businessman strolling down their street with a tie as red as blood, a busker with neon orange Nikes.

“That man who passed us on the street as we walked out the door,” Holmes says as Joan brings over the coffee. “I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

“I’d say the laundromat, but we both know you don’t do laundry.” It’s dreadfully sunny. The light reflects violently off the glass of the office building across the road, the lenses of Joan’s sunglasses.

“No,” he says. “Somewhere else. He doesn’t live on our street. He was checking an address on his phone.”

Another thing he hasn’t told Joan: there’s no guarantee that London won’t follow him across the Atlantic.

Joan taps a finger against the plastic top of her coffee cup. “It must be hard, noticing everything all the time.”

“Cocaine helped,” Holmes says, and he gets up. They’ve got work to do.

The man was just a businessman, he decides. New York’s his for now. For now.

...

Bricks at his fingertips.

London is soft yellow bricks. Grit and stone. Leaning against a wall on a bitter night, the bricks leaching his warmth.

In the last months before he goes into rehab, London seems too _sharp_ somehow. Too many sharp sideways glances, too many blind alleys. He scrapes his knuckles open falling down into a gutter somewhere. Stands shivering on a dawn-quiet street in Lambeth, feeling the drizzle in his hair.

He lies on the couch in his cramped, squalid little bedsit and listens to the traffic outside, the freight trains rattling a block away. He closes his eyes. That sound — and the rough patch of fabric beneath his fingers, a cigarette burn — is the only thing holding him down, he realises.

Then there is a body in an alley, a mistake, a man he should have put in jail but didn’t. He calls his father with shaking hands, a dry throat, admits defeat.

...

Sleeping in the same house as somebody brings about a sort of false intimacy. He knows that Joan uses cinnamon toothpaste and sets the coffee machine on a timer. She’s like a zombie when she first wakes up. He learns her mannerisms, maps her body. The way her hair falls over her face as she reads, the absent way she hooks it behind her ear. The little sigh she lets out when she hangs up from an unsatisfactory phone call.

He wonders if New York might be the same to him after a while: A whiff of perfume as a woman passes him on the subway. The garlic-meat smell coming from a kebab shop on Broadway. Late summer-night smells of piss and sweat and rotting cabbage and jostling, boozy humanity.

They come out of the subway entrance into the sudden clamour of the streets. The yellow rush of cabs and pedestrians and pelican crossings is disorienting for a moment. He lets his eyes flutter closed and feels Joan put her hand on his arm, Concerned (with a capital C), and he can hardly admit it to her but he _needs her_ , her constancy and her quiet strength.

The sun is shining and he’s learning a new map, a new way of doing things.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from [This Mess We're In](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO9tA8-kbk8) by PJ Harvey. The [Tyburn Tree](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyburn_Tree#Tyburn_gallows) was the name used for a gallows at Tyburn, near London. Hangings took place there until the late eighteenth century.


End file.
